A Helpful Tension

Continuing our discussion of the theoretical questions a democratic reformer in the Deweyan tradition would need to answer:

While reformers will find it a challenge to construct a sound logical case for their program, they may well deem it the least of their problems once they face the task of persuading a skeptical public. A strong argument will help, of course, but the plight of the ‘undiscovered public’ is that its members are ruled by ignorance and passions more than by rationality, so thus will often fail to recognize the wisdom of even the best-argued position. The reformer might be able to sidestep this problem with a rational appeal to a ruling elite, one which would hopefully be more receptive to such tactics and be willing to enforce the reform upon the reluctant public. Unfortunately for the Deweyan reformer, ruling elites enforcing policies from above is exactly what he is trying to prevent. Direct persuasion of the public is the goal, so that the public might create for itself the most beneficial social structure possible. Reformers have no alternative but to confront the would-be public’s resistance to change, especially when such change challenges popularly held beliefs about the justice, morality, and validity of the current society.
The reformers’ best tool in this effort may well be the very social image that is the target of reform. Society forms its beliefs about itself in haphazard, piecemeal fashion, and is often unable or unwilling to develop its new ideas through to a conclusion.
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Squids . . . of the Future!

So, over the holidays, did anyone else endure the bizarre Discovery Channel / Animal Planet special The Future Is Wild? According to that little show about the evolution of life on Earth 100-200 million years from now, everything’s going to turn into some kind of squid. Squids on land, squids in the sea, squids for you and squids for me. I kid you not, the whole show really seemed to be steered by unnamed “experts” who have a tentacle fetish.

Now, don’t get me wrong, the production values were amazing – a deceptively slick-looking mix of CGI, live-action, and simple shots of stuff like churning water to suggest the movement of giant squids, all earnestly narrated as though we’re pretty sure that Earth’s ecosystem is, even now, gearing itself toward squid. (And what of humanity? Oh, we ditched this mudball centuries ago, establishing colonies elsewhere, and we sent a probe back, through whose eyes all these multifarious squid-descendants are seen for the purposes of this special. Silly…don’t they know we’re going to evolve into Vorlons or something?)

With that in mind, I have some predictions of my own. Call it an inkling of our squid-filled future, with predictions aplenty of calamari calamity: Continue reading “Squids . . . of the Future!”

My Little Hang-Ups

It has now been almost two years since my wife and I moved into the rental house we now occupy. Owned by her family, this house was formerly her grandmother’s, and so the utilities and other bills have been in the same name for some fifty years now. And so has the phone number. We are forbidden to change the phone number in the event that any of her grandmother’s friends call up for the first time in years to check on her. And this presents a problem.

For the past 21 months – actually, I suspect, for much longer than that – we have been innundated with calls for Cintas, the local uniform vendor. When we got our first phone book not long after moving in, we discovered to our horror that our phone number was printed in Cintas’ Yellow Pages listing for all to see.

And so it begins, every morning at about eight, the phone starts ringing off the hook. Continue reading “My Little Hang-Ups”

Just Desserts?

The Bush Administration recently filed a brief with the Supreme Court stating its opposition to the University of Michigan’s affirmative action admissions policy. One of the rhetorical points quickly made by the administration’s critics is that Bush himself benefited from affirmative action in his academic applications, using his geographical location and status as a ‘legacy’ student to help him get into Andover and Yale. It’s a pretty effective debating technique, highlighting the fact that – especially when it comes to education – strict ‘merit’ rarely completely wins the day. What I’ve wondered more and more since the stories started hitting the press is, is that such a bad thing?

The idea of a meritocracy appeals to everyone’s innate sense of fairness, I think. We like to see other people get what they deserve, and we like to think that whatever we have, we have because we’ve earned it. In its idealized form, it’s a terrific guiding principle. But when you put it into practice, it becomes pretty mushy. Sticking with education, how do you determine academic merit? Grades? But different schools have different grading systems, not to mention different curricula and standards. Just an example – my high school worked on a 4.0-scale, and didn’t give extra weight to As from honors classes. The guy with the highest GPA in my graduating class didn’t take many – if any – honors math or English classes, while the guy right behind him did. (I am neither of the people in this example, for anyone who might think I’m bitter or anything.) Standardized test might help smooth out the comparisons – but studies have shown that they don’t nearly as good a job predicting future academic performance as our current reliance on them would suggest. Continue reading “Just Desserts?”

The Virtue of Patience

One of Not News’ central tenets is that by providing a forum for discussion of current social problems, we can help build a truly democratic society. In that discussion, however, it’s sometimes easy to ignore the question of what a ‘truly democratic society’ is, or how we should go about building it. I’d like to use the next few Philosophy slots in the article rotation to discuss some of these issues, starting this time out with the question of how far into the future reformers can look in good conscience.

Even when a group of people agree that a system or society must change, the question of how fast it should change can be extremely divisive – as is the related but often overlooked question of how fast it can change. Some of this division can be traced to conflicting agendas, a lack of clearly articulated ideals, or a poor decision-making structure within a reform movement, but in and of itself the timing issue is contentious. Reformers often target those elements of the social order that pose an immediate threat to the physical and mental well-being of large segments of the population, many of which are rooted in longstanding traditions such that any delay in addressing them only compounds the injustice. However, while ‘When do we want it? Now!’ might be an effective rallying cry, and an expression of the optimal turn of events, a truly pragmatic reformer must inevitably accept compromise and look to the future, setting timeframes not in terms of months or even years, but in generations.
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Get Your Fill, But Get It Good

Taking your infant to the doctor can be a nerve-wracking experience. Not only do you have to sit there and not throttle the person sticking sharp metal objects into your helpless child, there’s generally something the doctor finds that you – yes, YOU – could be doing better.

This visit, it was feeding. Apparently, Alex is on the low end of the weight scale for her height. She’s healthy, but the doc would like to see her put on a little weight. Now, anyone who has seen our child can tell you that she is no waif. She’s got properly plump baby arms and legs and round, plump cheeks (yes, on both ends, thank you very much). At first I was a bit perturbed. What the heck did this doctor want, a Michelin baby? I thought Alex was fine. But the doctor is the expert and when I looked at the growth charts myself, I could see she had a point. Where had we gone wrong? I am still breast feeding as often as I can, though she occasionally gets formula bottles when I can’t feed her myself. We recently started her on solids with much success. As Dave so eloquently put it one day, “I’ve been shoveling orange stuff into her all day!� He was referring to Alex’s fondness for the yellow and orange end of the baby food spectrum – carrots, squash, peaches, etc.

This was, apparently, where we slipped up. A little too much solid stuff and not enough breast milk and formula. Apparently, the two solid food meals per day were filling her tummy so that she wasn’t hungry enough for the amount of breast milk/formula that a baby her size needs. Baby fruits and veggies are relatively light on calories whereas breast milk and formula are not. Admittedly, Dave and I may have been a little too excited about Alex starting solids that we overdid it. Now we know. Ease up on the colorful food pastes and crank up the liquid stuff – for now anyway.

Around the same time that we were revising Alex’s menu, I discovered that feeding children properly is a very hot topic these days. Earlier this year, the East Penn school district (near Allentown, PA) caused a national stir when it sent letters home to the parents of overweight students warning them about the dangers of obesity-related health problems. The national media soon got wind of the letters. The stir spurred an avalanche of articles in parenting and news magazines about an “epidemic of obesity� among American children.

In statistical terms, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that 13% of American children ages 6 to 11, and 14% of children 12 to 19, are overweight or obese. The CDC says it has been ringing the alarm about childhood obesity for years but that it was the so-called “fatty letters� from East Penn that finally brought the matter to the national forefront. In the meantime, everyone’s laying blame. Some blame the fast food company for marketing fatty meals to kids. Some blame schools for cutting back on physical education programs and serving unhealthy foods in cafeterias. Predictably, there are some blaming the Internet, TV, and computer games for being more interesting than the great outdoors.

It’s obvious that there a number of factors at work here, and as much as I would like to blame McDonald’s for all the world’s ills, I cannot. Really, the bottom line is, education. Beyond calories and fat, most Americans really don’t know a lot about nutrition. Many know they should eat better but don’t take the time to learn how. Given that adult obesity rates are upwards of 55%, is it any wonder that kids aren’t making sound nutritional choices? Kids follow the nutritional examples of the adults around them. I have firsthand knowledge that babies aren’t born hating carrots but if all I eat for the next five years is cheese fries, which do you think Alex is going to prefer?

But just as adults who put themselves on strict diets doom themselves to almost certain failure, forcing kids to subsist on soymilk and spinach isn’t realistic. Eating healthfully isn’t an all-or-nothing endeavor, nor should it always be about calories and losing or gaining weight. It’s about achieving balance – and that’s hard for an adult to understand, let alone kids. Our society’s motto is, if a little is good, more is better. If you’re looking for solid information on good nutrition, here are some sources on the Net:

Even though my daughter’s weight issue came from the other end of the scale, I can sympathize with the East Penn parents who received those letters. I felt tremendous guilt that someone else had to point out I wasn’t making all the right choices for my child’s health. But I made a commitment to myself and to Alex to fix my mistake. We followed the doc’s advice about solids. I also picked up a book nutrition for children. In Child of Mine: Feeding with Love and Good Sense, Ellyn Satter offers the following advice:

“The parent is responsible for what, when, where. The child is responsible for how much and whether. If you are doing your job and your child’s job, you are doing too much.â€?

As I write this, Alex is telling me, in her own special way, that she is hungry. If nothing else, the kid’s got a great sense of timing.

Why I Watch Them Play the Games

I’m starting this essay while waiting for the start of a Monday Night Football game between the Philadelphia Eagles and the San Francisco 49ers. Since the Eagles’ franchise quarterback Donovan McNabb broke his ankle last week, there’s a very good chance that the Eagles will lose and I will be a sullen, morose individual by the time I’m finished. Because while intellectually I can accept that the odds are against my team, I still believe they can win, and I certainly hope that they do.

You may ask yourself at this point why I’m going to spend three to four hours absorbed in something that’s likely to disappoint me. Besides a healthy dose of masochism, there’s something uniquely compelling about sports, because you can’t help but be aware that no one really know what’s going to happen next. It’s one of the greatest proving grounds for the notion that truth can be stranger than fiction. Last night I watched a football game between the Indianapolis Colts and the Denver Broncos, played in Denver, in the snow. Indianapolis’ kicker, Mike Vanderjagt, had missed field goals attempts in each of his last three games, but he hit a 54-yarder in the final seconds to tie the game. Then he hit a 51-yarder into the wind to win the game. All of those late heroics were only possible, however, because Denver’s placekicker had missed an extra point earlier in the game – his first miss in over 300 attempts. You write that in a script, no one believes it. But to see it unfold live was exhilarating. Continue reading “Why I Watch Them Play the Games”

It’s Not Just Sausages

For those of you who haven’t read Eric Schlosser’s book Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the American Meal, forgive me for giving away some of the mystery – fast food is bad for you. It contains lots of fat, salt, calories, cholesterol, and other things that can, over time, be hard on your health. Good, with that out of the way, we can get down to what this book is really about – and it ain’t just French fries.

Much to the dismay of the meat and poultry industries, since its publication in early 2001, Schlosser’s book has put their business under the national microscope as much as it has the actual purveyors of fatty fare, if not more so. Why? Well, Schlosser takes the reader beyond the fast food outlets back to the source of the food – back to the potato fields and processing plants, the cattle feedlots and slaughterhouses, back to the poultry farms.

Whether you agree or disagree with Schlosser’s politics (and they are pretty obvious from the onset), you can’t help but be intrigued or even alarmed by the allegations he makes about the safety of the America’s food supply. He alleges that the meat industry – urged by its largest buyers, the fast food chains – have compromised public health safety in their quest to get meat from “farmâ€? (a loose term since animals rarely graze anymore) to slaughterhouse to market quickly and cheaply.

In the aftermath of the “mad cow� scare, several high profile meat recalls, and with some now worrying that our food supply is vulnerable to terrorist attacks, food safety is high on the national radar. But are we doing anything about it? Frankly, it doesn’t seem like it. Though Schlosser’s allegations created a media stir last year, fast food sales have not plummeted. Beef and poultry sales remain steady. Consumers seem content to remain willfully ignorant about the possibility that the meat they serve may not be entirely safe. The consumer’s mantra: “I try not to think about it.�

I thought about quoting some of the more colorful excerpts from FFN and a series about meat safety that PBS’ Frontline produced earlier this year but, in the interest of space and for those who can’t stomach it, I’ll simply link to them.

I will, however, highlight some of the major concerns that have been raised about the American meat supply. These include compelling arguments that modern methods of feeding, slaughtering and packaging meat actually increase the likelihood that the resulting product will contaminated by E. coli, salmonella, and other foodborne bacteria. In addition, there are huge gaps in the authority the federal government wields over the meat-packing and poultry industries. For example:

  • Incidents of E. coli contamination have increased in the past fifty years because this bacteria does not live in the intestinal tract of cattle fed grass. It is only since cattle began eating largely corn diets that deadly strains of E. coli were able to thrive in their bodies and end up in the meat. Why do cattle eat corn instead of grass? It fattens them up faster, and an animal fed corn can go from birth to the slaughterhouse in 12 to 14 months instead of 3 to 5 years. In 1993, several people died of E. coli after eating hamburgers at the Jack-in-the-Box food chain on the West Coat. Since then, fast food chains have required that the meatpacking firms test their meat before take possession of it. However, most meat sent to supermarkets is not tested.
  • As meat operations merge and consolidate, the number of animals raised and processed under one roof reaches the hundreds of thousands. According to the CDC, this increases the likelihood that pathogens will pass from “one animal to anotherâ€? and on the processing line “from one carcass to another.â€?
  • The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) cannot order a mandatory recall of meat once they know it is contaminated. They must notify the firm in question, which then issues a voluntary recall. While no firm has refused to comply, this system causes delays. Carol Tucker Foreman, Director of the Food Policy Institute at Consumer Federation of America, writes, “I sat in rooms and negotiated voluntary recalls with companies. And their lawyers would quarrel and quibble and hold out for day after day, and by the time you finally got them to recall the meat, guess what? A lot of it had been eaten.â€? Statistics show that the amount of meat returned in recent high-profile national recalls averages around 20%.
  • The USDA is designed with an inherent conflict of interest – it is charged with both the regulation and promotion of meat and poultry products.

The major stumbling block to resolving these and many other issues about the safety of the food industry is the industry itself. The beef and poultry producers in this country comprise a powerful lobbying force. The have successfully lobbied to delay new USDA food testing systems and at least two times have blocked bills that would have given the USDA greater authority.

More recently, Democratic Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, then-chair of the Senate Agriculture committee, proposed the Meat and Poultry Pathogen Reduction Act of 2002 (S. 2013). Despite being co-sponsored by several key senators including Hillary Clinton (D-NY), Russ Feingold (D-WI), Paul Wellstone (D-MN), Charles Schumer (D-NY), Herb Kohl (D-WI), Richard Durbin (D-IL) and Arlen Specter (R-PA), the bill never made it out of committee.

There have been instances in recent years where public outcry did help stop some of the delays in legislation and move food safety bills forward to become law. But for that to happen now means that American consumers, not just the media, have to want to really think about what exactly is on their plates.

In the meantime – or perhaps as a starting point to get more involved on your own – there are places on the Net to go where you can learn more about safe meat handling and cooking, general food safety procedures, and alternatives to supermarket meat, including the USDA’s Food Safety site. One such place is the web site for the Whole Food Markets chain of stores. They update their site with the latest news about food safety regulation, heath advisories, recalls, and other information. And, Whole Foods Markets’ site also gets high points for its “Take Actionâ€? page, which allows you to search for your own elected officials, find out which elected officials are on which legislative committees, and more. Well done, Whole Foods. And here I thought you just made great bread.

Peirce Strings

While John Dewey is considered one of the classical pragmatists, ‘pragmatism’ is not a word he often used to describe his way of thinking. Rather, the term was popularized in the early 1900s by Harvard philosopher William James, who credited the term to an old friend of his named Charles Sanders Peirce. For a number of reasons, Peirce never attained the academic successes of Dewey and James, and he gradually developed a complex philosophical system that is beyond the scope of both my expertise and this article. However, in a series of articles published in popular magazines in the late 1800s, Peirce set forth in rather clear terms a number of the principles that James and Dewey later adopted and developed.

Peirce was deeply interested in what he called the fixation of belief. Belief by Peirce’s definition is the opposite of doubt – when we have a belief, we know how we should respond to a given situation, but when we are in doubt, we are momentarily unable to act. The doubt acts as an irritant, provoking us to do something to establish a belief and therefore regain our ability to act. Let’s take a somewhat trivial example to illustrate the point. If I want to go somewhere, I might have to decide whether to take the bus or walk. If I already have some established belief about which method of travel is better, I’ll choose that method without much of a thought, and go about my business. But let’s say I can’t decide. I am in doubt over the preferred method of travel, and so I neither walk nor take the bus. Instead I need to take some kind of action to resolve the doubt. I might check my pocket and realize I don’t have exact fare, at which point I believe that walking is the best course of action. Doubt resolved, course of action chosen, I can proceed.

According to Peirce, the human being doesn’t really care how the doubt gets resolved. It just wants the doubt gone. However, human history has revealed that some methods are ultimately more effective than others. Peirce defines ‘more effective’ according to the original goal of eliminating doubt – if a method generates a belief that generates a new doubt almost immediately, it’s not a very good method. Peirce identified four commonly used methods, and he wasn’t shy about pointing out his favorite.
Continue reading “Peirce Strings”

How I Learned to Love Comics Continuity

So a few weeks ago Pattie and I were visiting my mother, and the premiere of Birds of Prey hit the screen. If you haven’t caught it, the basic premise is that three attractive female superheroes and one attractive male cop run around Gotham City fighting crime. With all the attractive people running around, the show certainly fits into The WB’s overall oeuvre, but that’s not why my family sat down to watch. Since the show is loosely based on the DC comic of the same name, we were there to observe – and where necessary, explain – where the show’s writers drew their inspiration.

And that’s the true genius of the show, from where I’m standing. It draws concepts from just about every interpretation of Batman over the last 25 years, and smooshes them all together with some attractive people and Top 40 hits. Pattie, my brother and I spent the night trying to explain it all to my mother.

“The therapist is a bad guy?”
“Yeah, she came from the animated series.”
“When did Catwoman have superpowers?”
“The Tim Burton movies.”
“The Joker shot Batgirl?”
“Yeah, Alan Moore wrote that in the mid-80s.”
“Wait a second, Batman has a daughter?”
“That’s from the seventies.”
“Who’s that in the Batman suit?”
“The guy from the OnStar commercials.”

Now, you may think that we’re freaks for keeping track of all this information. On the other hand, right now Fox is broadcasting the World Series and keeping track of the number of outs the Angels have made on ground balls. Every supermarket checkout lane includes multiple guides to the latest soap opera goings-on. And there are plenty of folks who know so many details about major military battles that they go out and re-enact the things. So obsessive attention to detail is not the sole purview of the superhero comics fan.

On the other hand, we do have some of our own little quirks, but I think the world would be a better place if those quirks became more widely accepted. Take the retcon, for example. Retcon is a shortened form of ‘retroactive continuity,’ which is what happens when one writer decides that some story that got written ten or twenty years didn’t actually happen the way the previous writer wrote it. For example, in 1985 Marv Wolfman and George Perez produced Crisis on Infinite Earths, which basically established that nothing DC Comics ever published actually happened, unless someone later decided to say that it did. (That this sort of revision happens often enough that comics fans not only came up with a technical term for it, but eventually needed a shortened slang version, should tell you something.) Sometimes this is necessary because the old story attempted to be current and topical, which is often a bad idea because time never really passes in comic books. Sometimes the new writer doesn’t like the old writer, and sticks in a retcon as a bit of a literary poke in the eye. And sometimes the writer is just trying to surprise people, with the old ‘Everything you knew is wrong!’ trick.

Either way, I think it would be fun to be able to employ the retcon in our everyday lives. It could work like instant replay in football, where each half the coach can throw a red flag on the ground and get the ref to look at instant replay to change a call.

BOSS: Those proposals you were supposed to send to the Los Angeles office never got there, and so we lost the big account! You’re fired!
DAVE: (throwing flag on the ground) That’s a terrible plot development. I demand a retcon.
BOSS: Great job getting those proposals done at the last second! The client’s so happy they’ve sent you this priceless collection of rare gems as a token of their appreciation, and we’re giving you that big promotion and the desk with the comfy chair!

Then there’s the ‘imaginary story.’ This occurs when the writer of a story wants to make clear that no one will ever acknowledge the events of the story again, and they will have absolutely no repercussions for any of the characters’ ongoing plotlines, and therefore should be distinguished from the non-imaginary stories of people who fly, run at the speed of light, and stick to walls. This supposedly gives the writer license to tell edgier, more outrageous, or more ridiculous stories, although it often results in ‘What if Superman’s rocket were found by Batman’s parents?’ On the other hand, imagine waking up and declaring that today is actually an imaginary story. Eat all the junk food you want. Rip off a mattress tag. It doesn’t matter – it’s an imaginary story! Of course, when it’s over, you may not remember that any of it happened, but hey, that might be a good thing too. Those mattress clerks can get really protective.

There is one potential drawback to this concept, as Birds of Prey the TV show aptly illustrates. No matter how many writers try to simplify things, no matter how many retcons they may employ, no piece of continuity ever really truly dies. There’s always the chance that the imaginary me who ripped off that mattress tag is gonna show up demanding a crossover, and those always end up in trouble. Plus there will undoubtedly be some guy on an Internet message board arguing passionately that my firing was a much better story than the rare gems. At least I can take comfort in the fact that no one pays any attention to people on the Internet.